Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies".

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's movie is the 1994 science fiction adventure film "Stargate".

It was directed by Roland Emmerich from a screenplay he wrote with co-producer Dean Devlin.

"Stargate" stars Kurt Russell, James Spader, Jaye Davidson, and Viveca Lindfors with Alexis Cruz, Mili Avital, John Diehl, Erick Avari, and French Stewart.

In a prologue set in an archeological dig in Giza, Egypt in 1928, Cynthia Langford, the young daughter of expedition's leader, is present when workers unearth a startling discovery.

Huge cover stones adorned with hieroglyphic writing.

In the present day, the mature Cynthia attends a lecture given by a young Egyptologist, Daniel Jackson, who tries to convince a skeptical audience that the pyramids were built not by the Egyptians, but by extraterrestrial beings.

Afterwards, Cynthia offers Jackson work as a translator for the United States Government.

Without resources and with no other viable options, Jackson accepts the job.

Taken to a secret Air Force installation deep inside Creek Mountain, Colorado, he is set to work translating the hieroglyphic writing on the cover stones found in Giza some 66 years before, but he is also expected to decipher some unknown markings on what the cover stones were meant to protect.

A huge ring made from an otherwise unknown metal.

Jackson translates the writing on the cover stones as, "A million years into the sky is Ra, sealed and buried for all time, his Stargate."

Immediately afterward, the project is placed under the authority of Special Operations Colonel Jack O'Neil.

The research team determines that the huge metal ring is a Stargate, a device capable of generating a wormhole leading to another Stargate on a planet on the other side of the known universe.

All Jackson has to do is figure out the proper coordinates to walk into the Stargate to make it operational.

Once he does so, a probe is sent through the Stargate, followed by O'Neil, Jackson, and a team of soldiers.

Their mission is to reconnoiter and return.

But Colonel O'Neil has additional secret orders the others know nothing about, and what they find once they pass through the wormhole created by the Stargate is something that none of them could ever have imagined.

The basic plot of Stargate draws on both a scientific hypothesis and a pseudo-scientific theory.

The hypothesis is that there is a possible form of space travel called an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, named after physicists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen.

An Einstein-Rosen Bridge is a small, localized black hole, often called a wormhole that could unite two distant points in the universe in such a way as to allow travel between them in a brief period of time.

The term wormhole is based on the analogy of a worm boring its way through an apple from one surface to another instead of traveling along its exterior.

The Einstein-Rosen Bridge is entirely theoretical, but it's been a popular concept in science fiction, including such serious films as 1997's "Contact" starring Jodi Foster and Matthew McConaughey, and comedies like 1989's "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" with Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, and George Carlin.

The pseudoscientific theory that informs the plot of "Stargate" is that intelligent extraterrestrial beings came to earth in ancient times and left their mark on the practices and beliefs of early human beings.

Although the idea of extraterrestrial beings influencing the course of human civilization appears in literature beginning in the late 19th century, including the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the Cthulhu mythos of HP Lovecraft, it became part of popular consciousness through the efforts of German author Erich Von Daniken.

His speculative nonfiction book, "Chariots of the Gods: Unsolved Mysteries of the Past" was first published in German in 1968, and subsequently became a New York Times Bestseller in its English translation.

Von Daniken postulated that the technology and the more puzzling artifacts of the ancient world, including the pyramids, Stonehenge, and the monumental stone heads on Easter Island, could be attributed to the work of extraterrestrial beings.

These otherworldly visitors, he argued, came to be revered as gods by human beings and left traces of their existence in ancient religious practices, including some included in the Bible.

"Stargate" explicitly takes up that idea, although the plot limits the supposed extraterrestrial influence to ancient Egypt.

The prospects for Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich's screenplay for "Stargate actually becoming a motion picture were initially pretty dim.

When Kurt Russell first read the script, he thought it was terrible and turned it down.

Devlin and the other producers kept sweetening the pot until Russell finally accepted the role as Colonel Jack O'Neill.

Only later did Devlin learn the script Russell had read and hated was the first draft, not the final draft that became the basis for the movie.

James Spader also felt the script was awful as he later put it, but it was so bad in such an interesting way that it enticed him.

When he talked with Emmerich, the director's enthusiasm convinced Spader that the project, even with all its faults, might somehow become a success, but ultimately, Spader accepted the role of Daniel Jackson primarily for the money.

He said, "Acting for me is a passion, but it's also a job and I've always approached it as such.

There's no shame in taking a film because you need some money."

"Stargate," like many other science fiction movies from the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers films of the '30s to the still running "Star Wars" franchise, draws on a wide variety of familiar motion picture tropes and influences.

Robert Faires wrote in The Austin Chronicle at the film's release, "Emmerich's taken several tales, "Close Encounters," "Lawrence of Arabia," "Spartacus," "Battleground," and tried to stitch them into a star-spanning epic."

Critic James Berardinelli noted the influence of such diverse sources as "Star Wars," "Star Trek," "Close Encounters," "Dune," "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "Doctor Who," and even "Dances with Wolves" and "King Kong."

But to a great extent, the similarities between these other films and television programs and "Stargate" was a matter of them all employing familiar storylines, narrative devices and visual styles.

The encounters between the Earth explorers and the unsophisticated inhabitants of the desert planet reflect decades of movies involving explorers and so-called primitive people, whether in jungles on the American Frontier or on distant unknown planets.

The scene where Colonel O'Neill mystifies a group of boys with a cigarette lighter has an ancestry so old and so hackneyed that it was already parodied in a New Yorker cartoon in the early '50s.

Similarly, hordes of ill-treated people dressed in rags, joining forces with heroic strangers from another world to overcome ruthless overlords with mystical powers were something of a staple in low budget movies in the late '80s.

Examples range from 1986's "Outlaw of Gor" with Jack Palance to 1987's director video "Robot Holocaust" and "Alien from LA," the South African update of Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth," starring supermodel Kathy Ireland.

The early screenings of "Stargate" were not encouraging either with only about a third of any given preview audience giving the movie good marks.

Executive producer Mario Kassar pinpointed the problem.

Viewers couldn't make sense of the plot.

The movie was revamped to provide subtitles for K. Davidson's Egyptian dialogue is raw, subtitles that essentially explained the plot.

After that, the preview audience's reviews were strongly positive.

The same cannot be said of the critical response, which was decidedly mixed.

Even those critics who wrote positive notices admitted that the story was neither logical, nor original.

Jay Carr wrote in the Boston Globe, "It works not because ridiculousness is concealed, but because ridiculousness on this scale becomes something else.

Don't let anyone tell you that "Stargate," lifeless script and all isn't clunky fun, probably trembling on the brink of classic camp."

Hal Hinson in The Washington Post called it "A loopy, mostly entertaining sci-fi adventure.

Audiences, for the most part, agreed.

"Stargate" was a surprise hit, earning more than $196 million worldwide.

It was nominated for several awards and became the foundation of a movie and television franchise, including two more movies and four television series that continues to run to the present day.

Critic Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun Times, on the other hand, relegated the original movie to his list of most hated films where it remained for over a decade.

He wrote in his initial review, "Stargate" is like a film school exercise.

Assignment: conceive of the weirdest plot you can think of and reduce it as quickly as possible to action movie cliches.

If possible, include sun god Ra, and make sure something gets blowed up real good."

Please join us again next time for another Saturday "Night at the Movies."

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.